How Peninsula Papagayo Restaurants Are Expanding

For most of Peninsula Papagayo's history, deciding where to eat meant deciding whose guest you were. Book at Four Seasons and your dinner options ran through the Four Seasons kitchens. Stay at Andaz and Ostra, Chao Pescao, and whatever the main restaurant happened to be called that season were your world. The peninsula has always had three resorts sharing 1,400 acres of coastline, and until recently, each one ran its dining program like a household running its own pantry. Crossing over for a meal at a neighboring property meant a phone call, a reservation, and sometimes a name at a gate.

That arrangement is starting to change, and the reason is not a new tasting menu. It is a restaurant that opened in December 2025 without a hotel attached to it at all.

Three Resorts, Three Kitchens

Peninsula Papagayo's dining reputation was built hotel by hotel. Four Seasons carries Nemare, the steakhouse tucked into the golf clubhouse, and Virador Beach Club, where chef Khaled Natour runs a Mediterranean and Levantine menu against the ocean. Andaz built its identity around Ostra's Southeast Asian cooking and the sushi counter inside it, Perla. For years, if you wanted variety, you picked a resort and stayed loyal to its dining room.

That loyalty was never really optional. Restaurant access on the peninsula has long been tied to where you are staying. Villa guests and hotel guests at one property can often make reservations at another, but the process runs through concierge desks and advance notice, not a walk-in. The Club at Peninsula Papagayo, the membership body that governs the golf course and the Ocean Course clubhouse, restricts play and some dining to members and registered guests of the three resorts specifically. The peninsula, for all its shared roads and golf carts, has functioned less like one destination and more like three adjacent ones.

The Arms Race of 2025

Then 2025 turned into a genuine competition. In February, Nekajui, a Ritz-Carlton Reserve opened as the first Ritz-Carlton Reserve property in Central or South America, and it arrived with a dining program built to be talked about. Chef Diego Muñoz's Puna became the reservation people planned trips around, with a hidden six-seat omakase called Paruro tucked inside it. Niri Beach Club, reachable only by a small funicular down to the water, added Iberian cooking grounded in Costa Rican ingredients. Ámbar, an open-air bar suspended in the tree canopy, became the sunset spot people mention first.

Andaz answered within the year. What had been Rio Bhongo, the resort's main restaurant, was reimagined that November as Gaio, an Italian trattoria led by chef Sergio Montoya, built around a wood-fired pizza oven and family-style plates meant to be shared. The same renovation gave Chao Pescao a new performance stage for live music, turning what had been a tapas bar into what Andaz now bills as the peninsula's late-night draw.

Line up the additions from the past eighteen months and the pattern is clear:

• February 2025: Nekajui opens with Puna, Paruro, Niri Beach Club, and Ámbar
• November 2025: Andaz relaunches its main restaurant as Gaio and adds a music stage to Chao Pescao
• Ongoing: Four Seasons continues to run Nemare and Virador Beach Club as its signature venues

Every one of these moves came from a hotel operator competing with the resort next door. That is worth noticing, because it means the peninsula's dining growth, as impressive as it has been, was still organized entirely around three separate front desks.

Then Someone Built a Restaurant in the Middle

Papagayo Park opened in December 2025 as a twenty-three acre, twenty-six million dollar recreation hub developed by Mohari Hospitality and Gencom, the same group behind Nekajui, with landscape planning by EDSA. It has six pickleball courts, two padel courts, a pump track, a wellness shala called Espira, and a dog park. It also has two restaurants: Patio Social and Cono Loco, a gelato counter.

Neither belongs to a hotel. The park sits near The Enclaves at Nacascolo Bay, a residential neighborhood rather than a resort lobby, and its stated purpose was never about filling hotel rooms. Peninsula Papagayo's own leadership described the project as infrastructure for daily life on the peninsula rather than another amenity for traveling guests, a distinction that matters more than it sounds. Every other kitchen on the peninsula answers to a general manager trying to keep hotel guests fed and happy. Patio Social answers to the master developer, and its intended customer is whoever happens to be on the peninsula that day, resident or otherwise.

That is a small operational detail with a bigger implication. For the first time, there is a place to eat here that was not built to compete with the hotel next door.

The Marina Was Already Doing This

Marina Papagayo got there first, even if nobody framed it that way at the time. As of May 2026, the marina counts twenty-one restaurants according to OpenTable's own listings, anchored by spots like Dive Bar, none of which are tied to a single resort's guest list. It has functioned for years as neutral ground, the one part of the peninsula where you go for dinner regardless of which property you are staying at.

Put the marina and the new park side by side and a second pattern shows up alongside the hotel arms race. The places growing fastest right now are not the ones inside a resort's walls. They are the ones in between.

What Changes on an Ordinary Night

For someone who already lives on the peninsula, this shows up less as news and more as a change in habit. A weeknight dinner used to mean picking a resort and driving or golf-carting over, working out in advance whether you would need a reservation and a name at the gate. Papagayo Park adds an option that requires neither. It sits along the same corridor of golf cart paths and, according to the peninsula's own materials, the newer e-bike fleet meant to move people between neighborhoods and hotels, which makes it one of the few dinner plans on the peninsula that does not depend on whose guest list you are on.

None of this replaces a reservation at Puna, which remains the harder ticket and the more ambitious kitchen by a wide margin. But the more telling signal of where Peninsula Papagayo is headed might not be the tasting menu at Nekajui. It might be a gelato counter and a casual restaurant sitting on land that belongs to the whole peninsula rather than to any one hotel on it. A resort community and an actual community are not the same thing, and the difference tends to show up first in where people can eat without asking permission.

Whether that shift continues, and what it eventually means for how the peninsula's residential neighborhoods relate to its hotels, is the kind of question worth watching over the next few seasons rather than answering today.

Peter Kempf International tracks these shifts across the handful of international markets where the firm advises clients directly, including Guanacaste's private residence and fractional ownership landscape. If you are weighing a property on the peninsula or simply want a clearer read on how its neighborhoods are evolving, Peter Kempf International is a useful place to start that conversation.